Whatever your take is on projects, at the end of the day it is just a bunch of people working together to achieve a certain goal. During this endeavor to laugh, cry, pull pranks, play dirty tricks and have all other kind of behavior towards each other. If you are lucky they even work to reach the final goal. If you take everything away, and put people in the center of what a "project" is, you will see a group of stakeholders interacting with each other, just like any other group of people would do.

Just to make things easier on our lives, we call the result of all this behavior "the project". In this sense it is nothing more than an abstraction. If we say "the project is late", this doesn't mean that some creature or entity from outer space showed up later than expected; it is the result of the project people working together that wasn't finished on the time we predicted.

In this sense the word "project" is the same as "economy". If our economy is improving, there is not some kind of energy force that is doing better than before. The whole system of people working, people buying and people living that is better off in some way than in the past. We need this kind of abstraction, just to be able to cope with it; it is easier to talk about the economy than about 100 million individuals.

And the funny thing is that this abstraction influences the people that make up the underlying system; if the economy is doing better, people will spend more, if a project is late, people will work harder.

Figure: the interactions of stakeholders "make" the project. The properties given to the abstraction "project" influence the stakeholders.

If you try to define a project from this point of view, the best definition I know of comes from Doug De Carlo (2005) in Extreme Project Management:

"A project is a localized energy field comprising a set of thoughts, emotions, and interactions continually expressing themselves in physical form."

In case you are wondering at this moment what the role of the Project Manager is in this context. He should steer the stakeholders in such a manner that the resulting behavior (the sum if you will) reaches the desired business goal. But that will be the main focus of the entire book, so relax, we will get into this later on in much detail. For now, just hold on to the thought that the stakeholders make up the elements of the project as a system. They are independent from each other, but their social interactions affect each other.

The following postings provide additional information about viewing a project as the result of interactions:

My Current Model For PM
Complex Adaptive Systems
Projects As A Complex Adaptive System: Why Bother?
The Sims As A Project Model
Sims Project Model: Tiffanys Lust
Sims Project Model: Berts Lack Of Recognition
Reality Refuses To Follow Your Plan
Explaining PM Approaches
Four Mechanisms In PM Methods
Why Societies And Projects Fail Or Succeed
Project Profiling With Systems Thinking